Posted
by
Zonkon Friday July 20, 2007 @11:50AM
from the sleeps-better-on-his-bed-of-royalties dept.

StonyandCher writes "A retired spammer is looking to make money from a tell-all book rather than fleecing people dependent on pharmaceuticals and people with gambling problems. In this Computerworld article 'Ed', a retired spammer, predicts the spam problem will only get worse, aided by consumers with dependencies and faster broadband speeds. From the article: 'He sent spam to recovering gambling addicts enticing them to gambling Web sites. He used e-mail addresses of people known to have bought antianxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam. Response rates to spam tend to be a fraction of 1 percent. But Ed said he once got a 30 percent response rate for a campaign. The product? A niche type of adult entertainment: photos of fully clothed women popping balloons ... "Yes, I know I'm going to hell," said Ed."

From the article: 'He sent spam to recovering gambling addicts enticing them to gambling Web sites. He used e-mail addresses of people known to have bought antianxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam. Response rates to spam tend to be a fraction of 1 percent.

I work with targeted communications and our success rates with similar lists are just as "successful". We were looking to contact Juniors and Seniors in HS to let them know of our offerings and had a list that supposedly contained names and addresses (no e-mail/phone) of people that would be in this demographic. Out of 9800 people we had a 0.93% response rate. Being that the cost of that list was as low as it was we will do it again...

I can only imagine what an advantage it is having such a low communication cost (it costs us.41/each) and having a 1% return rate... If only I could retire on the money I make;)

I find it very telling that there's very little of the usual/. moral outrage associated with spam.

It's clearly okay for corporations to collect and maintain detailed records of individual consumer preferences, financial records and medical records. And yet, when identity theft stories appear, there is the usual hue and cry "something must be done!"

It seems to me that few people understand the two go together like beer and potato chips.

Direct sales, no matter what the form, are a Bad Thing - they are an invasion of my privacy and make me go to some effort (whether that effort be answering the phone and telling someone to get lost, deleting spam emails or taking spam snail mail to the recycling bin).

If we ignore the environmental burden caused by printing and delivering snail mail spam, I find it much less obnoxious than email spam for a number of reasons:1. It comes in once a day, and I can sort it in a few seconds, as opposed to trickling in all day long and distracting me.2. Since it has significant costs to send, it is almost never as blatantly stupid as most of the spam emails I get.3. Since the post office does investigate mail fraud (at least in the US), most of the offers may be stupid, but

The Direct Marketing Association will gladly remove you from member mailing lists (stopping about 85% of junk mail, in my experience)

With email and SMS spam:

The recipient bears the majority of the cost (actually, the ISP does, in terms of increased bandwidth and storage requirements, but they pass these costs on to subscribers in order to keep making a profit; the distinction is therefor irrelevant).

"E-mail fraud" doesn't have the same problems as mail fraud, and is not readily investigated

There is no large central trade association that manages the majority of e-mail marketing -- you often can't get your name off of anyone's lists

With telemarketing:

The caller bears the cost

The recipient has no control over the timing (the phone rings during dinner, e.g.), making it very annoying

There is a do-not-call registry

In short, people put up with junk mail because it doesn't cost them anything, only saps a couple of minutes of time once a day (at most!), and isn't particularly annoying.

People don't like e-mail and SMS spam because it costs them something, is very annoying, is often fradulent, and takes time and effort to deal with almost every time one checks one's mail. Likewise, telemarketing is very annoying.

Oh I'm sure the "Department of Homeland Security" with the urging of the IRS will be drafting several letters to get the identity of this guy... paid in cash?! He is bound to be hit up for tax evasion. Yes, indeed he *IS* going to hell, but he won't have to die to get there!

Perhaps the mailing list in question consisted of those who responded to one of his previous spamming campaign for a similar niche. In TFA he mentioned repeat customers for meds; I guess the addresses of those who previously responded to spam must be the most valuable of all. You know that spam works on them and you know what they're into.

I keep re-reading that passage thinking that there is some detail that I'm probably missing.....then again, the way fetishes go, probably not. Seriously though, why can't we seem to find women with oddball fetishes? or are they just better at keeping it to themselves?

My guess? Right before he wrote that, he created a website with women popping balloons and is now making tons of revenue off the huge volume of views the ads on the site are getting now that it's being/.'d.

From a balloon fetish website:
Balloon fetishists, who also call themselves looners, balloonophiles, or loonatics, get off on blowing up and/or popping latex balloons. Some looners actually have sex with the balloons by sticking their equipment in the nozzle (obviously, you have to be male to pull this off). Others enjoy putting balloons inside their clothing.

Some looners actually have sex with the balloons by sticking their equipment in the nozzle (obviously, you have to be male to pull this off).

Ok, oddball question time. Using the above quote, yes, only a man can stick his equipment inside the balloon. However, what about the reverse? Sticking the balloon inside a woman and GENTLY inflating and deflating it again and again.

Without doing any research whatsoever, I'm going to guess that the reason for the balloon fetish is similar to the reason for the so-called "crush fetish" whereby guys enjoy watching women step on bugs. The latter is due to how, while growing up, their mother would scream and then step on bugs, exciting a lot of surprise and excitement in the child, which molded his psyche and eventually developed into arousal. Similarly, perhaps children got the same sort of panic from balloons popping.

Without doing any research whatsoever, I'm going to guess that the reason for the balloon fetish is similar to the reason for the so-called "crush fetish" whereby guys enjoy watching women step on bugs.

I've always thought trying to figure out the root cause for a fetish is kinda pointless unless someone has a really strong obsession which interferes with their normal life and they need clinical care.

Sure, some people probably do have some fetishes which start out with some kind of Freudian-explainable experience. But, you don't need to rely on a man who used a lot of cocaine and figured everything revolved around how you were potty trained, and how badly you wanted to sleep with/kill your mother to determine why someone might do something for their own pleasure.

Nowadays, fetishes are so easy to find information on (like, say, a Slashdot article;-) that you can pretty much do a little research, see if any fetishes might work for you, and then try them on for size. I question if most people involved in any form of fetish play nowadays actually have a truly abnormal physchological fixation with something, or have just rationally decided that, say, latex is cool or whatever.

Lets face it, go to an adult store and they've got all of the fixin's for fetish play just sitting there. You could just one day decide to try one of them out. Spot a video and decide to watch it. Or, possibly, a partner will suggest it one day just for fun.

Fetishes don't need to be just irrational/compulsive obsessions any more. They can be conscious decisions that you stumble upon and decide will just be damned fun. As Freud himself said... sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. (Although, I guess maybe if you choose it, it may not technically be a 'fetish' in the clinical sense. I just view it as a new set of toys you can choose to play with or not.)

I for one welcome our fully clothed, balloon-popping female overlords.

1) does not involve "killing/having sex with mother" desires, and2) does not attempt to morally condemn the fetishist

Sorry, I didn't mean to infer that you were doing either of those. I was more responding to the position that there is some childhood event which made people pre-disposed to such things. Most such explanations end up being Freudian in nature, and then I just took the opportunity to point out that he wasn't the most rational of sources. So muc

Well I googled (you know. . to uh. . verify the integrity of the summary) but came across something also quite bizarre . ..2 people died [sptimes.com] after crawling into a large helium filled balloon in a rich suburban neighborhood. ..sometimes google surprises me with what it thinks is relevant to my query.

'He sent spam to recovering gambling addicts enticing them to gambling Web sites. He used e-mail addresses of people known to have bought antianxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam. '

Some companies dealing with confidential information clearly have been passing on this information.

This guy should be forced to disclose where he got the information from, so that these companies can be punished for poor data security, or worse, actually selling such sensitive private information on.

I also believe that there are laws against the exploitation of vulnerable people, but they're probably next to useless, and poorly defined (or specifically defined, so won't apply to X because it only mentions Y).

How many people work at credit card and insurance companies doing low-paid data entry? How much more could they make if they were using some of their time to make lists of names and addresses of people with specific ailments or problems and selling them on the black market?

As long as there is demand, and the business is profitable, you will have spam. Trying to get rid of spammers will only make it more profitable and worth the risks for those remaining. Wake up! It is no different than anything else. The customer drives this business, not the seller. They(the seller) are simply a response. Talk about passing the buck!

When a spammer intentionally targets gambling addicts with gambling spam, then the spammer deserves blame. I agree that often customers should be chided for supporting the spam business model, but gambling addicts are tormented enough and the blame falls with the spammer who exploits their demons.

Capitalism or any other economic system can in fact be tempered with a sense of justice, fairness, and decency and still function. One way of ensuring that justice, fairness, and decency prevail is to call out the opposite when you see it. Just because something is a certain way doesn't mean it should be. Your wording isn't clear, so let me ask straight up: are you saying we shouldn't criticize people who engage in immoral or unethical behavior but legal behavior?

If a system encourages the exploitation of weakness, is it in the best interest of the weak to support such a system?

I don't think it's always useful to make such distinctions. We in the west tend to apply reductionist thought patterns to systems analysis problems, and it doesn't work. We can't just pick an arbitrary point in a system and say, "that's our problem, right there!" We need to look at patterns & feedback loops.

In this case, you choose to isolate and morally condemn the demand side of the equation as if it had no interaction with the supply side. The idea that everyone is solely responsible for their acti

"The customer drives this business, not the seller. They(the seller) are simply a response. Talk about passing the buck!"

The solution is simple. The Chinese handled problems with the opium trade by killing the addicts. This drove down demand considerably. Perhaps a similar campaign can be waged on email users. I guarantee if all email recipients were killed, there would be a substantial reduction in successful spammers.

The people who talk in theatre are watching their favorite movie for eternity, except the seat behind them holds a fully-clothed women popping balloons. And the seats to either side of them hold the men who are buying the videos of the fully-clothed women popping balloons.

Hmm, I wonder if Satan would pay me a usage fee if I trademarked that. Eh, probably not, he has enough lawyers to fight his way out of it.

Under the assumption that no one does nothing for nothing, this is good news as it indicates that the risk benifit curve has shifted so that selling a book is better money than spamming.

It is like those get rich quick schemes on paid TV. If it were so easy, then why is the promoter not making the million dollars a week instead of making cheesy commercials. If I made a million a week for a year, I certainly would not be on TV telling everyone about it, at the risk of reducing my real profit opportuities. I would hiding out in my fortress of richness and enjoying the money.

This also reinforces my assumption that for the most part spamming is just a way to make some easy money without much real work. Most people are not going to get rich off it, but if one is a country where a few thousand a year is good money, then hey, it beats doing honest work. It might even product the 20K a year one needs to live in the US. But like any organized crime, a few get insanely rich, and the rest get knocked off for pocket change.

If it were so easy, then why is the promoter not making the million dollars a week instead of making cheesy commercials.

I'm not saying all late-night TV schemers are legit (few are, imo). But once you've made your first million or so, you are pretty much set (Invest 3/4 of it and your RoR on a mediocre year is over 50k). You might as well train the 'next generation' with the understanding you get to tap a few % of what they make as overhead.

this is good news as it indicates that the risk benifit curve has shifted so that selling a book is better money than spamming.

Not really -- it probably indicative of him being tired of living an underground life and having to watch his back. And he's certainly sitting on good money. Like other markets (drugs, etc.) some people will push until they make enough money they are content with, then pack it in. It's just a calculated risk -- pursue something long enough to reach a certain cash goal, and if yo

It's pretty easy to see why someone would write a book about their success plan, instead of continuing it: More Money!Take the "Make millions in real estate" category. It works... in fact, it's so rock-stupidly simple that TLC has shows about it now with people who really have no business in real estate somehow managing not to lose money. Sure, most of those people are only making $100K-$200K per year at it, but they don't do it for a living.

Take the "Make millions in real estate" category. It works... in fact, it's so rock-stupidly simple that TLC has shows about it now with people who really have no business in real estate somehow managing not to lose money. Sure, most of those people are only making $100K-$200K per year at it, but they don't do it for a living.

So, why don't these millionaire-author guys keep doing it? Because it's hard work all the time. Books, OTOH, are hard work for the time taken to research, write, and promote it.... b

This also reinforces my assumption that for the most part spamming is just a way to make some easy money without much real work. Most people are not going to get rich off it, but if one is a country where a few thousand a year is good money, then hey, it beats doing honest work. It might even product the 20K a year one needs to live in the US. But like any organized crime, a few get insanely rich, and the rest get knocked off for pocket change.

I know an owner of a legitimate "spam" business. The owner grosses over $20 million a year with an approximate 50% margin of profit. The amount of money made depends on several factors that are difficult to maintain over time, which is why you don't see everyone making 10's of millions dollars off spam.

a clean email list - cleaning an email list requires sending an email and not receiving a bounce. There is risk in testing the email because if you test too many bad ones you can get blocked, but once it's tested it's worth considerably more than an unclean email.

list of active users - users who opened or clicked. An order of magnitude more valuable than a clean email.

relationships - avoiding email blocks and getting unblocked

distributed servers - avoid email blocks by sending from and rotating multiple IPs. The more you have, the more stable the delivery is.

delivery - your email has to make it to the inbox. An order of magnitude more valuable than Bulk box delivery. Bulk delivery is still better than no delivery, which can be the case if you're blocked.

If you have all those factors in your favor, you can sustain the profits, which is what the major "legitimate" commercial emailers do. The true spammers are usually a bit more shitty, using trojans and disposable accounts, but achieve the same effect, usually at the cost of the ISP, however they're risking jail time if they're caught.

steady influx of new emails - the list will degrade over time, so you need to replace those emails to maintain a constant list size

Now with legitimate spammers, they will honor complaints and unsubscribes. Processing them quickly does help a lot, because you can just repurchase the email on another list and continue slamming the hell out of them until they unsub once again. Heh. You just purchase or create new "lists" ad nauseum to get keep them active. Heh.

Remove the word "legitimate" and take the quotes off the word spam. There's no difference between what you (I'm sorry, the 'owner you know') do and what you call "true spammers" do. You are still dealing in unsolicited commercial mass emails that people don't want.In fact, looking over your list of what makes this enterprise "legitimate", every single one of them involves circumventing and defeating the protections that people and ISPs spend a lot of time and money to put up and maintain to keep this mai

Remove the word "legitimate" and take the quotes off the word spam. There's no difference between what you (I'm sorry, the 'owner you know') do and what you call "true spammers" do. You are still dealing in unsolicited commercial mass emails that people don't want.

Legitimate as in.. not breaking any laws. There are lots of slimy things you can do that aren't illegal.

You are still dealing in unsolicited commercial mass emails that people don't want.

Every day I get spam from "legitimate" businesses like DiscoverCard, my College (AZ State U)'s Alumni Association, and even my mortgage company (Countrywide). Just because these asshats are BIG deals or have some ongoing business relationship with me does NOT legitimize their spam - it remains unsolicited and unwanted.Sears and Craftsman tools are the worst - everyday there's something.

Anyway, nice sentiment in your post, however there's something you should realize. Your opinion doesn't matter because you're one individual among a group of spam recipients. You won't click an ad and purchase, but for every one of you there are 100 of your peers that will.

When it comes to understanding why spam works, you have to think in terms of group social behavior

Bull. You doth protest too much, methinks, and you know far too much about this business "the owner you know" has to not be a part of it somehow. I suspect you see this owner every time you look in the mirror.

You won't click an ad and purchase, but for every one of you there are 100 of your peers that will.

Actually, it's the other way around. With less than 1% response rate, for every one of us that won't there's another 100 of us that also won't.

So what does it matter that one spammer makes lots of money. That is like saying that one pan handler makes a more than a living wage, so all pan handlers have more money than the average person. Some people are particularly good at what they do, and they know how to manage the economic forces,and can manage their scruples, so they do well.

Well. I think most underestimate just how many spammers there are. You can purchase spam software for $500, which lets you input a 50,000 email text file and away you g

But Ed said he once got a 30 percent response rate for a campaign. The product? A niche type of adult entertainment: photos of fully clothed women popping balloons... "Yes, I know I'm going to hell," said Ed.

This seems like the least objectionable use of spam. There seem to be three problems with spam.

First, truely evil spam that contains malware, fraudulent offers, or other things that people might call the police about if it arrived via snail-mail (I'm assuming the adult entertainment site was just pornography and not malware infested).

Second, that the spammer uses botnets to accomplish his goal, which is to hid his operation because of spam-filtering/laws etc (I'm assuming the botnet is just for anonimity, as a huge e-mail server shouldn't be that costly to run.)

Finally, that we are diluged in 3,000-1,000,000 e-mails a day for crap we don't want. But a 30% success rate means that the ads were fairly well targeted and most people did want them. Ignoring for the moment the scary database that produces these lists, if you got 10 pieces of spam offering you legitimite, cheap things you may want to buy, I don't think people would be upset at all. In fact, it might make a good e-commerce site. [midnightbox.com]

A mail server isn't that expensive to run, but if you're a spammer then it's going to need it's IP address changing on a regular basis, since it's going to get blacklisted frequently.

That's the advantage of a botnet - if you've got enough zombies in your network then there's no way they're all going to get blacklisted, and it's possible to replace nodes that have been quick enough that it won't make much difference.

Ignoring for the moment the scary database that produces these lists, if you got 10 pieces of spam offering you legitimite, cheap things you may want to buy, I don't think people would be upset at all. In fact, it might make a good e-commerce site.

I would. I'd mind terribly. Putting aside the creepy privacy issues (which would be enough to set me off), I just simply don't like push advertising at all. I don't want my life to interrupted by people interjecting their pleas for me to give them my money for crap I don't need.

I don't like TV ads. I don't like radio ads. I don't like billboards. I don't like fliers on phone poles. I HATE people who stick menus in my apartment door, I HATE telemarketers, and I'd hate spammers too even if they were selling me things I want. I have a habit of stopping doing business with any business that gets too pushy with its advertising (like the people who stick menus in your door), and a spam for something I want is the best way to keep me from ever buying it (at least from that vendor).

The only kind of advertising that I like is the kind where you list a product in some public forum, and I find it when I decide I'm in the market for it. (e.g. Froogle.) Anything that tries to come and find me to tell me how wonderful my life would be if I just bought it is annoying. (And God forbid an ad actually be effective and influence me to do something unwise with my money.) Unless your ad entertains me, go away.

(And yes, I realize that I am on the far end of crotchety about advertising, but that's just my opinion.)

I know you're just trolling, but two points:1) Trying to start a real relationship is different from asking for money (or sex).2) Forcing your desperation on a stranger is different from asking to deepen a relationship with a friend.

I don't mind Amazon telling me about things that I might like when I log in. I would mind if they started spontaneously emailing me about these things or if one of their partners that I'd never done business with started

This is why targeting is important. If I go to the local singles bar and hit on girls, it's assumed they wanted to be hit on, otherwise they wouldn't be in the local singles bar. If I go to the local gay bar, it is assumed that other men are going to hit on me, otherwise I wouldn't be there. If I go to the local fetish club, and a girl tries to interest me in something kinky, that's expected. None of these activities should stray to locations associated with the others.I get refinance your home spam. I

The only way to get rid of spam is for everyone on the planet to swear off buying anything based on spam based advertising. I know I never respond to spam, but there's always going to be that one person who does...

It all comes back to the who risk/reward thing. Lower the ratio enough, and you'll find fewer people willing to do it. So on the one side is increasing the risk. Used to be spam had no risk, other than maybe somebody punching you if they found out what you did for a living. Now there's starting to be some risk as a few spammers are getting prosecuted. So that's the first part of the solution is to grow the risk. Get better at having criminal and civil penalties dropped on spammers.

Then, of course, there's reducing the reward, the amount of people who respond. This is a technical solution in the form of better spam filtering. It's already getting much better. Even just 5 years ago it was still somewhat rare to see ISPs filter their mail, now virtually all of them do. Also the filtering itself is getting better. Rather than just rely on a simple analysis of a given message it is cross checking messages, some of it even across different organizations. By improving this we can drastically drop the number of people they are able to successfully contact and thus lower the reward. If 1 in 100 spams go to someone, you don't need many of those someones to respond to make some money. However if less than 1 in 10,000,000 go through, you need a much higher response rate to make it worth while.

So while there's not a silver bullet it IS something that can be mitigated by going at it from a couple of different ways. If it goes from something you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on with zero risk to something that it's hard to make a couple grand a month on that is likely to put you in prison, the number of spammers will start dropping.

You have a good point, but you're assuming that the risk is increasing as the filtering techniques get better. The risk only exists if your spam gets through, as I find it improbable that authorities will go after spam that gets blocked. So, similar numbers of pieces of spam have to still get through for the risk to remain level or increasing. It also might be true that if there is a correlation between spam getting through and prosecution, filtering among the less-likely-to-buy victims might induce less

Honestly, technically I don't care if idiots buy spam products. The trouble is that e-mail is so cheap they can carpet bomb us trying to find the idiots. If I just could keep any spam from entering my inbox, they can buy penis enlargement pills, fake viagra, penny stocks and 411 scams all day long for all I care. A fool and his money will always part ways anyhow, and it's not in any way for their protection I want to exterminate spam. I just want them to leave me the hell out of it.

If all the spam were really targeted that well, I doubt there'd be so much animosity to the problem (except from credit service companies and psychologists who treat addicted gamblers).

What gets me is that after twenty years of using email, and 15 years of getting spam email, and 10 years with the same email address, I am currently getting a breakdown of spams like this (numbers guessed but not unrealistically):

I don't think, this article was written by a real (ex-)spammer. Either that, or it has been too heavily edited be plausible.

If he deliberately targeted only recovering gambling addicts or only people in need of particular drugs, he is not even a spammer by some of the (vague) definitions — spammers carpet-bomb all addresses they can reach, without trying to narrow down to the (relatively) small groups of addressees, as a more responsible marketeer would do (not to defend those types).

Has anyone seen the book? I would be interested in it if it provided sufficient technical details about how the spammer operated. (Though, I think I'd be more tempted to steal the book than actually buy it.)

Spammers pay real money for botnets/phishing websites etc, but their return is higherthan their expenses so they continue to plague us. Our spamfiltering solutions maydiminish their return, but apparently not enough.One interesting approach (from MIT Spam Conference) was these guys (SPAMALOT), who basically interact with the spammer as much as possible.

He used e-mail addresses of people known to have bought antianxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam.

I work at a hospital and am involved in HIPAA regulation compliance. This one line is proof that some company, hospital, care giver, pharmacy or what ever seriously violated HIPAA regulations by disclosing that information. By law that would make the spammer liable and force him to disclose his information for further prosecution of who ever gave him the list(s) of people on medication.

Yes, he did, a Beowulf cluster of them, while eating hot grits, and he had nat port stickers on the cases, and he had a full collection of OMG PONIES and he called himself the "I for one welcome our obligatory overlords" and his business plan was
1. spam
2. ???
3. Profit!!!

I for one wish there was a -6 beating a dead horse mod
I also wish i had the ability to delete/. accounts for people who continue to beat the dead horse...